Depth of Field - A simple guide to Photography

Depth of field is a term used in photography that defines how much of the shot is in focus. For instance sometimes you may want to take a photo of an object that you cannot move and the background is not very interesting or distracting, you can make the object in focus and blur the background by setting the f-stop to a low number.

The amount of depth of field is decided by two factors, firstly the focal length of the lens, using a longer lens will give you less depth of field and a shorter lens will give you more depth of field. Secondly the aperture setting that is used will decide on how much of the shot is in focus.

Using a low number f-stop such as f3 will give you less depth of field and only the object that you have focused on will be in focus. Using a larger f-stop such as f36 will result in obtaining more depth of field and almost everything will be in focus.

The photos below are a good example of depth of field, the first was taken with the f-stop set to f5.6 and as you can see only the foreground of the shot is in focus whilst everything behind has become blurred. However on the second shot which was taken with the f-stop set to f36 everything in the shot is in focus.